Idaho Ecosystems

Look at the plants and animals shown under each Idaho ecosystem. Write a sentence about your favorite animal and your favorite plant. Tell why you like them.

Write a story about the time you were lost in the desert or the mountains. What did you do to survive until you were rescued? Use names of plants and animals found in that ecosystem in your story. Caution!! Some plants are poisonous.

Write about Idaho's ecosystems. Tell what makes each one the way it is. Include weather, altitude, geologic formations, and other physical characteristics.

Compare the average rainfall for the area where you live. Do you live in a forest? A desert? Grassland? How do you know?

Write mathematical equations using data from Idaho Forest Products. Solve and label.

Write fractional statements using data from Idaho Forest Products.

Plants and animals can change their environment. Examples of plants and animals changing their environment could include a squirrel digging in the ground to hide its food and that tree roots can break concrete.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need. Examples of relationships could include that deer eat buds and leaves, therefore, they usually live in forested areas; and, grasses need sunlight so they often grow in meadows. Plants, animals, and their surroundings make up a system.

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things. Designs can be conveyed through sketches, drawings, or physical models. These representations are useful in communicating ideas for a problem’s solutions to other people. Examples of human influence on the land could include planting trees after a burn, protecting farm fields from erosion, or keeping plastic trash out of waterways.

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land and in water. The emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Many characteristics involve both inheritance and environment. The environment affects the traits that an organism develops. Characteristics result from individuals’ interactions with the environment, which can range from diet to learning. Examples of the environment affecting a trait could include that normally tall plants grown with insufficient water are stunted, and a pet dog that is given too much food and little exercise may become overweight.

Energy and fuels that humans use are derived from natural sources, and their use affects the environment in multiple ways. Examples of environmental effects could include negative biological impacts of wind turbines, erosion due to deforestation, loss of habitat due to dams or surface mining, and air pollution from burning of fossil fuels.

Plants and animals have both internal and external structures that serve various functions in growth, survival, behavior, and reproduction. Animals have various body systems with specific functions for sustaining life: skeletal, circulatory, respiratory, muscular, digestive, etc. Examples of structures could include heart, stomach, lung, brain, and skin. 

Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have effects on the land, vegetation, streams, ocean, air, and even outer space. Individuals and communities can often mitigate these effects through innovation and technology.

Examples of environmental changes could include changes in land characteristics, water distribution, temperature, food, and other organisms. When the environment changes in ways that affect a place's physical characteristics, temperature, or availability of resources, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die. Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics. Sometimes the differences in characteristics between individuals of the same species provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing. Examples of cause and effect relationships could be that plants that have larger thorns than other plants may be less likely to be eaten by predators, and animals that have better camouflage coloration than other animals may be more likely to survive and therefore more likely to leave offspring.

Human activities can have consequences on the biosphere, sometimes altering natural habitats and causing the extinction of other species. Technology and engineering can potentially help us best manage natural resources as populations increase. Examples of the design process include examining human environmental impacts, assessing the kinds of solutions that are feasible, and designing and evaluating solutions that could reduce that impact. Examples of human impacts can include water usage (such as the withdrawal of water from streams and aquifers or the construction of dams and levees), land usage (such as urban development, agriculture, or the removal of wetlands), and pollution (such as of the air, water, or land).

Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth’s terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem’s biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health. Changes in biodiversity can influence humans’ resources, such as food, energy, and medicines, as well as ecosystem services that humans rely on—for example, water purification and recycling. There are systematic processes for evaluating solutions with respect to how well they meet the criteria and constraints of a problem. Examples of ecosystem services could include water purification, nutrient recycling, and prevention of soil erosion. Examples of design solution constraints could include scientific, economic, and social considerations.

Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all its populations. Emphasis is on recognizing patterns in data and making warranted inferences about changes in populations, and on evaluating empirical evidence supporting arguments about changes to ecosystems.

Food webs can be broken down into multiple energy pyramids. Concepts should include biomass transfer between trophic levels and the environment. Emphasis is on describing the transfer of mass and energy beginning with producers, moving to primary and secondary consumers, and ending with decomposers.

Emphasis is on describing the conservation of matter and flow of energy into and out of various ecosystems, and on defining the boundaries of the system. Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level. Decomposers recycle nutrients from dead plant or animal matter back to the soil in terrestrial environments or to the water in aquatic environments. The atoms that make up the organisms in an ecosystem are cycled repeatedly between the living and nonliving parts of the ecosystem.

Predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments are shared. Emphasis is on predicting consistent patterns of interactions in different ecosystems in terms of the relationships among and between organisms.

Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors. In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction. Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources. Emphasis is on cause and effect relationships between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.